Building Technical Communities

Sunday Jun 13, 2010

Ian Skerret has announced the release of the 2010 Eclipse Community Survey
(blog post,
Report).
The survey is based on a, self-selected, sample of around 1700 respondents from the Eclipse community.
The report was done in April 2010, with respondents being mostly from small and medium-sized business,
with some geographic bias towards Germany and France.

The report is a follow-up to the
similar 2009 Survey,
with a similar sample, conducted in April 2009, so it is possible, in some cases, to do some trend analysis.

Like with all these studies, the sample size, the selection process, and the overall methodology affect the results;
with those caveats, below are some trends from the reports that seem worth highlighting and are consistent with
other indicators I've seen
(also see comments by
Savio
and
Kevin).
All numbers are percentages; the first one is from the 2009 report, the second from the 2010 report.

Server-Side Technologies
Again, direct Y/Y comparisons can't be done because in 2009 the survey asked for "all technologies that apply", while in 2010, it asked for the "primary" technology,
but the numbers for each year are (in %s):
2009: Servlets 64.7%; Spring 48%; EJBs 38.3%; OSGi/Equinox 9%
2010: Spring 19.7%; EJBs 18.6%; Other 11.8%; Servlets 10.1%; OSGi/Equinox 5.7%
The drop for Servlets in 2010 is most likely because they are not the "primary" technology.
Spring is on top for the 2010 Survey, but EJBs show the fastest growth.
OSGi remains a small percentage.

AppServers:
Finally, on Primary Application Server used in Deployment:
Tomcat (34.8% / 33.8%); None (25.3% / 30.8%); JBoss (12.7% / 10.5%); WAS (6.9% / 5.1%); Jetty (1.6% / 3.6%); Weblogic (4.2% / 3.3%); GlassFish (3.3% / 2.9%); Oracle AS (1.6% / -).
All the app servers, except Jetty and "none" lost market share in 2010 (at least for this sample).
Jetty likely is benefiting from being part of the Eclipse community;
"none" might be "deploy on Web Server", or "don't know", or ???.
My take-home on GlassFish is that we have a huge opportunity for growth here,
now that we have clarified the future under the leadership of Oracle.

Saturday Jun 05, 2010

We launched GlassFish 5 years ago, around JavaOne 2005. 5 years is worth a celebration... but, since JavaOne this year is in September, a virtual event - a blog - seems appropriate.

The month was June 2005; for the exact date we could go with either June 6th, the 8th, or the 27th, because we "kind-of" released GlassFish twice; once before JavaOne (June 8th), and then again, during JavaOne (June 27th)!
What happened is that the "first release" used the JRL (Wikipedia, Java.Net) license; in Dec 2004 we had released JAXB and JAX-RPC using JRL and JDL (announcement, explanation) and we were considering using those licenses for GlassFish, but those licenses are not OSI-approved and the response was not very positive, so... during JavaOne we announced we would release GlassFish using a true OSI license: CDDL (Sun page, Wikipedia).
Why the 6th and not the 8th? The 6th is when Marc Fleury pre-announced the June 8th release, so I chose the earliest date of the 3.

So that's the date. On the folks involved... well, one of the main reasons why GlassFish has been successful is because it has been such an inclusive project. A list of everybody would be, literally, hundreds of people (see the
poster project); but folks that worked on the launch included Jeet Kaul, Abhijit Kumar, Vivek Nagar, Jim Driscoll, Jean-Francois Arcand, Dinesh Patil, Qingqing Ouyang, Bonnie Kellet, Inderjeet Singh, Larry Freeman, Greg Murray, Carla Mott, Amy Roh, and many, many more. Higher up the chain were Jonathan Schwartz, Joe Keller and James Gosling - without whose support the GlassFish launch would have been much harder.

The last 5 years have been quite a ride for Sparky; and I think the next 5 will be too: we just released GlassFish 3.1 M1 and are about to release GlassFish 3.0.1. Onward!

I found a few old links from the launch, plus a bunch of nice photos from JavaOne 2005; check them out below - specially the t-shirt that James is wearing for his life-long award ceremony.
I also intended to do a timeline of key GlassFish-related events in the last 5 years, using the
FrontPage
tag, but it quickly became too large;
I will try to do that as a separate, future, post.